The irony here is that while Hacker News is not growth-driven and that's surely part of what makes it great, the bills are paid by a firm that couldn't be more focused on growth.
Here's a thought, which is probably far too political for its own good but oh well. The characteristics of the software industry (both the ones we love and hate) boil in great part down to IP and business law... why not get behind legal reforms that would mitigate the growth at all cost environment. For instance if America had a better antitrust framework then some of the more predatory business plans out there might never have been written. And Stallman, the FSF etc. have been out there for many years pushing us to think about IP in a way that has had enormous societal benefits.
It would be awesome if we could collectively get to the point where growth didn't have to trump everything else, so exploiting people's attention didn't have to dominate everything else, so more interesting and long-term satisfying things could flourish. It's unfortunately not clear what the path from here to there might look like.
I think about this a lot because Hacker News, for all its problems and fractiousness, is in sort of a blessed position where we're not subject to those same pressures and can optimize for other things. But it's also two orders of magnitude smaller than Reddit, which means we're not facing the same problems at all. If I think about facing those problems at that scale, the phrases 'sheer terror' and 'passing out' come to mind.